Talentspotter shines a spotlight on Asian artists, offering both critical and market insights. The entries below originally ran in The Asia Pivot, Artnet Pro’s biweekly members-only newsletter providing mission-critical analysis, insights, and exclusive intelligence on developments in Asia’s art worlds, with a focus on business opportunities and challenges. Subscribe here to receive it directly to your inbox.
At a moment when many in the art world are seeking authenticity and emotional depth, a cohort of young Asian painters is standing out for their deeply personal, often diaristic work. Whether exploring diasporic identity, domestic life, or the quiet tensions of growing up, these artists create intimate worlds with global resonance. Their practices are grounded in sharp observation and meticulous technique, offering viewers a window into both private interiors and collective experience. Here, we spotlight five artists whose canvases trace memory, belonging, and vulnerability with profound subtlety.
1. Dianna Settles
Dianna Settles, In folding and being folded by the suns, the struggles, the Springs (2024). © Dianna Settles. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Marguo
Who: Dianna Settles (b. 1989, Los Alamitos, Calif.)
Based in: Atlanta
Gallery: March Gallery (New York) and Galerie Marguo (Paris)
Why we care: Dianna Settles is a Vietnamese American artist based in Atlanta, where she lives on an urban farm as part of a close-knit community. Her art features vibrant color palettes, poetic compositions, and playful, subtle details, and often focuses on collective experiences. A pivotal trip to her father’s homeland of Vietnam in 2014 significantly shaped her artistic approach, allowing her to depict figures with whom she could personally relate. This journey also led her to develop a distinctive language that blends traditional Vietnamese art with European colonial influences. A sense of in-betweenness marks her art, which aims to reach people who may feel unseen.
Settles thrives on discovering connections across different experiences. Her work often centers on marginalized bodies, using them to convey feelings of alienation that she transforms into sources of empowerment. She captures fleeting moments of joy, isolation, strength, and friendship, aiming to shape these transient emotions into something that is enduring and yet still fluid.
Alongside her art practice, Settles runs Hi-Lo Press, a collective print studio and art gallery in Atlanta, which she founded in 2016.
—Cathy Fan
2. Shiwen Wang
Shiwen Wang, Belakang Mati (2024). Image courtesy of Michael Kohn Gallery
Who: Shiwen Wang (b. 1995, Shanghai)
Based in: London
Gallery: Michael Kohn in Los Angeles and ADZ Gallery in Lisbon
Why we care: Shiwen Wang finds inspiration right before nightfall, in twilight, a liminal time she sees as a moment of convergence between human and non-human life. Through her exploration of light, Wang creates abstract compositions that reflect on impermanence and the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world, a relationship she describes as “the unity of cosmic life.” Her work transforms commonplace subjects like fish, decomposing leaves, and boat wreckage into unfamiliar, poetic forms, capturing cycles of decay and rebirth. Her dynamic paintings blend natural and artificial light via earth-toned and aquatic palettes with textured layers of oil, pigment, beeswax, and egg tempera evoking an aged patina. Her intuitive approach reflects a deep engagement with color and materiality.
A graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, Wang has exhibited internationally, including at ADZ Gallery in Lisbon, Issuing Gallery in Shenzhen, and Millennium Gallery in London.
—C.F.
3. Kaifan Wang
Kaifan Wang, One Piece (2024). Photo: Hannah Mjølsnes
Who: Kaifan Wang (b. 1996, Hohhot, China)
Based in: Berlin
Gallery: GNYP Gallery (Berlin and Antwerp)
Why we care: Born in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, China, an area undergoing rapid urban development, Kaifan Wang has taken a nomadic approach in his art practice, making work that reflects the histories of the Chinese diaspora and the enduring narratives of the places he has inhabited, which include Shanghai, Florence, and now Berlin. His migration across these cities weaves together cultural references that find relevance in contemporary contexts.
Wang juxtaposes varied references, creating a discourse that bridges disparate elements in unexpected ways. His technique involves brushstrokes that either follow or resist natural forces, exploring themes of fractured cultural identities and the fluidity of human migration through dynamic gestural marks and mixed media on canvas. His latest work, One Piece, revisits Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze. Wang draws connections between Klimt’s use of gold leaf, the sandstorms of his childhood, and the gold rush that attracted early Chinese migrants to the United States, presenting gold as a motif for desire and memory.
Wang completed his fine arts education at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in 2022, and has participated in major group exhibitions at venues like the Songwon Art Center in Seoul and Wilhelm Hallen in Berlin. He recently held his first solo exhibition at the Blum Gallery in Los Angeles.
—C.F.
4. Lorraine Ren
Lorraine Ren, Swirl (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Podium, Hong Kong
Who: Lorraine Ren, who also goes by Jialin Ren (b. 1993, Shenyang, China)
Based in: Vancouver
Gallery: No gallery representation yet, but Ren had solo exhibitions at Hive Art Center in Beijing last year and Common Place, which is also in the Chinese capital, in 2022. She has shown with several other galleries, including Tang Contemporary in Hong Kong.
Why we care: Ren’s enigmatic, colorful paintings have caught the eye of gallerists and collectors scouting for emerging artists. These works often feature dreamlike depictions of nature and vegetation, from a white lily growing between the cracks of tree trunks to close-ups of tangled roots and swirling leaves. These seemingly ordinary scenes are layered with subtle contradictions. Though her subjects are real, her expressive brushstrokes lend them an abstract quality. Her choice of vivid hues evokes a heightened sense of emotions that are concealed beneath a tranquil surface. The poetic world that Ren creates on her canvases lies between reality and imagination.
—Vivienne Chow
5. Olivia Jia
Olivia Jia, Night studio, (bronze ritual vessel, horn comb with painted bird, branches, two lilies, portrait of my grandmother), 2025. Courtesy of Margot Samel and the artist. Photo by Matthew Sherman.
Who: Olivia Jia (b. 1994, Chicago)
Based in: Philadelphia
Gallery: Margot Samel (New York)
Why we care: Rather than simply viewing Olivia Jia’s paintings, it might be more accurate to say that one reads them. Often modest in scale, her canvases resemble opened sheets of paper—like a letter or book of family memories that has just been flipped open. Objects populate these imagined pages: a blue-and-white porcelain vase, an elegant comb, faded vintage photos. These painted objects seem to reverse, symbolically, the fact that her own family passed down no actual heirlooms.
Jia has spoken about growing up as a child of immigrants, feeling a sense of isolation and alienation within a predominantly white environment. Her signature blue-gray palette evokes what she calls a “nocturnal” tone—something between wakefulness and sleep—that is fitting for her meditations on imagined, fictive, and sometimes ephemeral things. She photographs historical objects and references internet-sourced imagery that might resemble undocumented artifacts from her ancestry. Through this process, she actively constructs subjects and narratives, blurring the boundaries between personal memory and historical fiction.
Jia received her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2017. A solo show of her work at Margot Samel just concluded last month. Her work is in the collections of the Palm Springs Art Museum in California, the Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach, Fla., and the Huamao Museum in Ningbo, China.
—C.F.